Are you using social listening tools to find influencers? Because you should.

One of the things we recently did in Mediatoolkit was a giant list of 100 influencer marketing tools. We made it because we kept getting a lot of questions from our clients regarding ways to find influencers and how Mediatoolkit can help.

But while we went and researched 100 tools, for different niches, different budgets, and different types of influencer marketing, we also forgot to write something more precise about how Mediatoolkit can help.

This blog is here to correct this oversight – because social listening tools are in fact one of the top 3 most useful ways for companies to find influencers.

First, some introduction.

Most people use social listening tools only to monitor their marketing campaigns and see whether someone is tweeting bad things about their company.

But that is just the start of what social listening tools can do.

They essentially giant, real-time website crawlers – much like Google. They visit pages and notify you when they find a word or hashtag that matches what you input. In Mediatoolkit, we visit more than 100 million online sources in real-time: this means Instagram posts, Twitter posts, random blogs from all corner of the world, news websites, Facebook pages, forums, and a plethora of other sources.

So when you write Acme Company, Mediatoolkit literally visits 100 million different URL’s so that you can get a little notification on your mobile phone, or an email to your inbox.

The problem is most people don’t take it anywhere from there. If they can’t use the tool to find the influencer in the first five seconds, they don’t want to bother with it.

I’m not here to tell you that’s wrong, but I can tell you is that you are losing significant advantage over your competitors if you are not doing it. Since rarely anyone does, the playing field is still still unplagued by the “marketers ruin everything” curse.

Now, to (finally) get to the point, here is what you should be doing:

Find influencers mentioning your brand

When Elena with 300 Twitter followers mentions you in a post, it is not only just another mention you should ignore because it doesn’t come from a celebrity. Maybe it’s not important, but dig deeper: maybe she’s a blogger with prominent web audience, who is just not that big on Twitter (happened to us once!). The same goes with everyone else who mentions you: explore their background a bit to see if they usually write about topics connected to your brand or industry.

Some people can also recommend your product in a specialized forum, and you won’t know it unless you use a social listening tool. Social listening is a great way of finding these forums. In Mediatoolkit we have several influencer dashboards that list influencers on social media and websites who have mentioned your brand in the last 3 months.

Find influencers mentioning your competitors

You should vigorously be monitoring your competitors as well. Not only will social media monitoring enable you to know what they are up to, it will also give you insight into people who are posting about them. For example, they might be already mentioned by a host of influencers who are spreading word about them.

While you don’t want to work with them if they are already collaborating with your competitors, a lot of the time these people might just be reviewing the product, or even mentioning the competitor in order for them to notice the influencer, or just mentioning the competitor in passing. You can use that that to your advantage. For example, a lot of beauty bloggers are going to use MAC cosmetics for their vlogs, but can also be open to other brands.

Find influencers mentioning your niche

Most of the time, influencers won’t be writing about you simply because they haven’t come across your brand, and sometimes they won’t even be writing about your competitors. For example, our target group (marketers and PR people) write more about the industry topics than about media monitoring tools. However, they do write about problems they encounter with measuring marketing campaigns, or challenges of social media – and these are all topics naturally aligned with our brand.

So we monitor a lot – and I do mean a lot – of keywords like #PRfail or #PRmeasurement or “influencer marketing”.

There are a lot of influencers who behave similarly in any niche. Sometimes other, non-competing brands will have a popular blog. If you are selling sunglasses, maybe your next influencer fit is not going to write about sunglasses, but they will about a similar topic like bikinis?

Consider which phrases go hand in hand with your brand and might be used by your influencers. If you need practical tips how to find them, check out this blog.

This is merely a short introduction, of course. If you need more details, you can always schedule a demo with our team or talk to us via chat, while the next blog comes along.

New to influencer marketing and want to explore other options as well?

Download our list of 100 tools. It has everything: from marketplaces where you can buy product shoutouts for just 5 USD a piece to searchable databases with millions and millions of influencers.

Download “100+ tools to find and manage influencers” ebook:

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Mediatoolkit is a media monitoring tool that tracks relevant mentions of your brand across the web and social media in real time. You can use it to get notified immediately when you are mentioned anywhere online and to discover meaningful insights behind every mention.

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